Fleek has raised $25 million (£18.75m) to build the AI infrastructure powering the global secondhand clothing industry.
The Series B funding will accelerate development of its AI-native marketplace, expand its engineering teams, scale its technology platform and grow its global buyer and supplier network.
The investment was led by Burda Principal Investments, an early Vinted backer and lead investor in its Series C round, with participation from eBay, FJ Labs, and H14, alongside existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, HV Capital, Y Combinator, and more.
Every year, up to 24 billion items travel from donation bins in London, Paris and New York to textile sorting and grading centres across the world. Yet despite demand for secondhand fashion growing three times faster than traditional apparel, the infrastructure powering this $200+ billion industry is manual, fragmented and offline.
Garments are still assessed by hand, graded using inconsistent standards and traded through disconnected networks with little pricing transparency. Without digitalisation, the industry simply cannot scale to meet the demand already in front of it.
Founded in 2021 by Abhi Arora and Sanket Agarwal, Fleek has built a B2B marketplace and AI systems to digitise this supply chain.
At the centre of the platform is Fleek Sort, a custom vision-language model trained on millions of secondhand marketplace transactions from Fleek’s global network over the past four years. Already used by graders in sorting hubs in Pakistan, India and Dubai, and in pilots launching in the UK, Europe and the US, Fleek Sort helps identify, categorise, grade and merchandise secondhand garments using photographs or videos, transforming a historically manual process into a digital workflow.
Once processed, inventory is automatically listed on Fleek’s marketplace, where AI-powered pricing, search, recommendation and matching systems connect stock with relevant buyers around the world.
Fleek says it helps suppliers increase recovery rates, enable buyers to source inventory more efficiently and reduce the volume of wasted clothing.
Today, Fleek’s platform connects 2,000+ verified wholesale suppliers and graders with 50,000+ retailers, resellers and boutiques across 100+ countries. The company has helped keep more than 12 million items in circulation, saving an estimated 13 billion litres of water, avoiding 23,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions and empowering thousands of secondhand and vintage clothing entrepreneurs.
“Most people have no idea what happens to a piece of clothing after they part with it,” said Abhi Arora, co-founder and CEO. “It travels thousands of miles, gets sorted by hand in a warehouse in Karachi, and finds its way back to a vintage shop in London or New York, if it’s lucky.
“We started Fleek because that system is broken, the market it serves is exploding, and nobody is building the technology and infrastructure to fix it.”
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Sanket Agarwal, co-founder and CTO, said: “There’s more data locked inside the global secondhand supply chain than almost any other market, yet historically very little of it has been captured.
“We’ve built the world’s first AI trained specifically to understand secondhand inventory — what it is, what it’s worth, who wants it and where demand exists. Every transaction improves that understanding, creating an intelligence layer we believe will become critical infrastructure for the future of the industry.”
Julian von Eckartsberg, managing director Europe at Burda Principal Investments, said: “We backed Vinted when secondhand fashion was still considered niche. We know what it takes to build a platform that scales in this market. From its growing supplier network to the technology behind it, Fleek is building the infrastructure the next generation of fashion will rely on.”
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